I must have been 9 or 10 years old when my mother gave me a big encyclopaedia of Greek mythology. I absolutely loved it. I bought The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony the year the Dutch translation was published, in 1991. I was hooked from the first page. This was the book I’d been waiting for.

Virginia Woolf renunciated the 19th century novel and the idea that life tells a narrative, that it unfolds as a tragedy, a comedy, a detective or some other style figure. A story creates a unity that doesn't exist, or at least not necessarily, thereby distorting reality.